Mirror to our passions

The novel’s last chapter opens with one of the most famous sentences in all of literature: the joyously succinct “Reader, I married him.’’ You cannot read those four words without letting your breath out and grinning. No matter how well you know the story, the characters’ moral dilemmas and emotional struggles are so complex that the happy outcome seems in doubt, and yet fully earned, each time.

“Jane Eyre’’ is a novel about passion. Yet although the book is a fierce, weird, exhilarating love story, the passionate cry that echoes, implicitly, again and again is not “I love you’’ but rather “It’s not fair.’’ Jane, an orphan, spends her childhood in the household of relatives who bully her, and punish her when she has the nerve to fight back. Then they send her off to a place that’s even more unfair: a nightmarish school whose pupils are humiliated and starved. The injustice is not just bad treatment; it has to do with being misunderstood, misperceived, and powerless.

By the time she arrives as a young governess at Thornfield, the house of Mr. Rochester, Jane is looking for a modest position in a spot that is “neat and orderly’’ — i.e. a rational universe. Thornfield, by some lights, is anything but, with its creepy laughter in the attic and unexplained middle-of-the-night fires. And there’s Mr. Rochester himself: rude, abrupt, goading, sulky, and perverse.

None of this fazes Jane. She uses the word “obscure’’ to describe herself, and her job is to speak only when spoken to. But Rochester does speak to her, and he listens to what she has to say. He’s startled and piqued by her bluntness and her independence and her composure. The early part of their relationship consists of his attempts to disconcert her, and her utter refusal to be disconcerted. She feels seen and heard — recognized, for the first time in her life. Despite the fact that they are master and servant, what goes on between them is a discourse between equals.

And what a discourse! Grumpy and tart and touchy, sometimes admiring, and always crackling with easily wounded vanity. Jane and Rochester are not easy people, but they tolerate and understand each other’s sharp edges. They are both shrews, who tame each other by not taming each other. This is one of the reasons I loved the book when I, like so many other people, first read it as an angry teenager.

When you read “Jane Eyre’’ you are Jane Eyre. There are other books of which this is true — “David Copperfield,’’ maybe “The Catcher in the Rye’’ — but “Jane Eyre’’ has a wider range of emotion, a more rigorous ethical compass, a deeper vein of erotic feeling, and a more colorfully and realistically mixed bag of flaws and attributes.

When Jane cries out to Rochester, “If God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you,’’ she is both declaring love and angrily protesting unfairness. It’s a messy combination of feelings — but recognizable: most of us have either blurted out, or wished we had the nerve to blurt out, something of the sort.

And that’s what is so powerful and real about “Jane Eyre.’’ Despite its extreme situations, the novel charts a kind of interior maturation progress that we all feel and know. It’s the story of an unruly misfit who eventually becomes a poised misfit, someone who struggles to govern strong feelings without either punishing or squelching them.

“My equal is here, and my likeness,’’ Rochester says to Jane. Yes. She is our equal, and our likeness.

Joan Wickersham’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Her website is www.joanwickersham.com.